The Mongrel rarely walked these halls of agony, where screams and pleading cries and the smells of blood and piss filled the air - not that he could smell them anymore, one of the rare instances in which he was grateful to have lost something. He was a warlord of the Brotherhood, famed leader of one of the greatest marauder tribes, and this place simply had little to do with him; the work of breaking new slave-soldiers was best left to the Taskmaster and his lesser overseers, while The Mongrel and his ilk focused on leading those soldiers in battle.
But the prisoner he had come to see was not any ordinary captive, and he couldn't scrub her from his mind. On the whole, the Maw's mission to Roon had been a
disaster, costing far more in lives and war materiel than it gained in useful Sith artifacts, but it
had yielded one consolation: Shai Krayt, the Wardog of Kestri, had fallen into Mawite hands. Amid the jungle mud and toppled trees of Clan Krayt's FOB, The Mongrel had faced her blade-to-blade, erupting from the earth to battle her in a duel to the death. Only it hadn't ended in a kill, but a capture.
It was poetic, he supposed. In their first encounter, when the New Imperial Order had come to Csaus to punish the traitor warlord Caelitus, she had approached him as the champion of his longtime rival
DECEASED Erskine Barran
. In that duel she had defeated him, rending open his chassis and sending him down into the depths of a frozen lake with a final shot from her armor-piercing pistol. But just as he had descended to
end that duel, he had ascended to
begin this one, rising from the tunnels carved out of Roon's crust by the Maw's digging machines.
He remembered what she'd told him when they had "parted" on Csaus.
Look at me, she'd said.
I want you to remember my face before I send you to your idols.
"I'll remember," he'd replied... and he
had. He'd never forgotten this foe who had come so close to ending him, to giving him the peace through martyrdom he so craved.
"But you won't send me to the Avatars, Wardog." And he'd been right about that. As always, he had survived, enduring to serve the dark gods who were not yet ready to give him his rest. And the tables had turned.
This time Shai had faced him without Barran's blessing, without the sword he'd lent her for the express purpose of crossing blades with his old rival. Perhaps that was why The Mongrel had been victorious this time, or perhaps not. Perhaps The Mongrel had grown in skill and cybernetic augmentation since that encounter. Perhaps surprise, and the terrain, had favored him. Perhaps Shai's defeat had been fated by the Avatars, or by simple bad luck. It did not matter now. She was at the mercy of the Maw, a "mercy" The Mongrel knew all too well.
She would suffer the same process
he had.
And the same process that Mercy had undergone at his command... which gave him pause. It was Mercy - Keilara, or so he now called her in the safety of his own mind - who had begun to change him. She had awoken the broken pieces of the man who had come before The Mongrel, made him see the ruin that the Brotherhood had made of him. It was too late to change anything, of course. The will of the Maw still bound him, determining his destiny. He could not help
himself, let alone Shai, even if he'd wanted to... and he wasn't sure what he wanted.
So why was he here? To see what became of the Wardog, he supposed. To gaze on her as she was, as he remembered her, one last time before the Brotherhood stripped it all away. To remind himself that he had inflicted on others, time and time again, the same fate he had suffered. To watch it happen in real time, obedient to his dark masters but filled with self-loathing. The doors slid open, and he stepped into the room where Shai hung in the suspensor field, gazing up at her.
"Wardog," he murmured, inclining his metal head.
Or tried to murmur, anyway. His voice was grating thunder.
"You will wish I'd given you a clean death on the battlefield," he promised her, the metallic words echoing loudly in the confined space. Some part of
him also wished he'd done so. But he served the gods of the Maw, and they demanded he not be wasteful; when a powerful enemy champion could be turned to their service, fighting to restore the cycle of War, Death, and Rebirth that the hateful Jedi had attempted to halt, he could not disobey. Rebellion against the Avatars was wrong,
unholy. It would mean that all his crimes...
... all his monstrous, wicked deeds...
... had been for nothing.
And so The Mongrel did not rebel. He obeyed. He still hoped for martyrdom, for the paradise of the Galaxy To Come that all who faithfully served the Maw could expect after death. If Shai survived the reconditioning, then she too would be able to gain such a reward.
"But when you finally see the truth," he told her,
"you will understand. I am being cruel to be kind. I am opening you to the One Truth of this broken galaxy, and placing your feet on the road to paradise." Such he believed, with all his heart and mind.
So why did he feel the need to justify himself to her?
The Mongrel
